Part 30 (1/2)

The two virtues peculiarly stimulated by Greek religion were courage in man and chast.i.ty in woman; these singularly correspond to the qualities that characterize solitary carnivora--ferocity in the male and compulsory fidelity in the female. They are the virtues that attend individualism, and individualism so impregnated Greek civilization that it prevented the Greek cities from ever combining into a Greek nation, and ultimately left them a prey to the invader.

And those two individualistic virtues--courage and chast.i.ty--became still more emphasized under the Roman rule in the soldier and the vestal.

Christianity introduced a new element into civilized life; Christ deprecated exhibitions of courage by inculcating humility; He tempered the fierce demand for fidelity by bidding ”him who was without sin cast the first stone at her.” The virtue He taught above all was the virtue of Love; not love in the sense of natural affection, but love in the sense of sacrifice; not love confined to the family, but love extended from the family to the neighbor: ”Love your neighbor as yourself.” And so under the dispensation of Christ all men, being the children of a common Father, became as brothers one to another; the early Christians carrying out this theory into practical life, abandoned the acquisition of private wealth and brought all their earnings into a common stock, giving to everyone according to his need.

Unfortunately, the prosperity of the Church under Constantine converted it into a political machine as unconscionable in its methods, and as effectual in results, as the so-called rings which govern many cities to-day. The Church forgot the virtues which it was inst.i.tuted to teach; and our Western civilization has ever since been distracting us by encouraging the fighting virtues of the Roman soldier on the one hand, and the altogether inconsistent humility of the Christian saint on the other.

But men and women cannot live close to one another for centuries, without having social virtues forced upon them; and while the compet.i.tive system which prevails in our industrial and international relations has stimulated the fighting qualities in us, the teaching of Christ has preserved in our hearts ideas of happiness which have more or less unconsciously created a tendency to replace compet.i.tion by cooperation wherever possible.

The joint effect of Roman and Christian rules of conduct has been to subst.i.tute for the qualities that we observe in Nature--the l.u.s.t and ferocity of the carnivore and the servility of the ant--new qualities altogether different, and in some respects almost opposite. For l.u.s.t has been replaced by a conception of the conjugal relation which converts marriage into a sacrament; ferocity has yielded to the courage of the medieval knight and the modern gentleman; servility tends to disappear and be replaced by respect for laws; and fear has been lifted by religion into reverence--”The fear of G.o.d is the beginning of wisdom.”

The fact that these virtues are held up to us as desirable and that we are trained to conform thereto, is of dominating importance in considering the character of human environment; and were there nothing in human inst.i.tutions to render the universal practice of these virtues impossible, we should a.s.suredly enjoy the happiness that must result therefrom.

Unfortunately there are two reasons why we cannot practice these virtues though we would:

We are divided into nations, each striving against all the rest to secure for its citizens the largest possible share of the good things of this world. Every nation is composed of individuals or families, each engaged in a similar strife.

The first, the international conflict, gives rise to a peculiar virtue called patriotism, which, in so far as it teaches a man to love the country to which he belongs, and the people amongst whom he lives, is altogether good, but in so far as it teaches him to hate and occasionally slay those of other nations is altogether bad.

The second, the intranational conflict, gives rise to a quality which, though not recognized as a virtue, should, if measured by the rewards it receives, be a.s.suredly regarded as the greatest of all--acquisitiveness; for the fortunate few who possess this quality gather unto themselves all the good things in the world at the expense of all the rest.

Let us briefly study each of these formidable obstacles to virtue and happiness:

As regards the international conflict, the world is so large, and is peopled by races of men so different, that it would be quite impossible to include them all under the same government. The Red Indian is incapable of adopting our civilization; he would rather die.

The Chinese has a conception of government so different from ours that he has no word in his language for patriotism. The Oriental, who has occupied the Danubian provinces for five centuries, is still so foreign to us that he cannot live amongst Christians except either as a conqueror in Turkey or a subject in Hindoostan.

So long as these differences exist, there must be separate nations; and the smoke of international conflict must occasionally burst into a flame.

Nevertheless, even to-day human effort can do much to diminish occasions for war; witness the Tribunal of The Hague and the daily multiplying treaties of arbitration; witness, too, the gradual extension of solidarity between workingmen beyond national frontiers and the growing disposition to organize regardless of them.

As regards the intranational conflict--between individuals belonging to the same country--there is much more to be said, for although the total elimination of occasions of conflict between citizens of the same nation may still be far off, there is serious reason to believe that a partial elimination of them is immediately possible, and may const.i.tute the most practical of all political programs, and the most vital of all religious faiths. Indeed, a thorough understanding of the problem presented by this intranational conflict is so indispensable to its prosperous solution, that upon this understanding may be said to depend the question whether our civilization is to degenerate.

The intranational conflict is mainly concerned with the acquisition of wealth; and because this conflict has so far inordinately enriched a few and impoverished the ma.s.s, it is the fas.h.i.+on for us to rail against wealth.

But wealth is the necessary product of civilization, and like manure, it is a benefaction when lightly distributed over the right place, though a pest when heavily concentrated in the wrong. The wealthier a community is the happier it ought to be. It is not wealth itself which const.i.tutes our grievance, but the method of its distribution.

Now the unequal distribution of wealth is mainly due to the system of private property under which the few who have the gift of money-making acquire large fortunes, while the many are left in comparative poverty and even want.

Under this system, every man, instead of working for all, is working only for himself, and he who has most acquisitiveness becomes master of those who have less, society being by this single quality divided into a series of cla.s.ses or castes, at the top of which are a few millionaires, and at the bottom the large contingent that after a life of misery end their lives in the almshouse, the prison, or the lunatic asylum--a contingent that has been determined by carefully prepared statistics to const.i.tute one-fifth of the entire population in the richest country in the world.[204]

Private property has played an essential role in the slow enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the people. But just as the coc.o.o.n serves an essential purpose in protecting the worm during its slow development, but becomes a prison which the b.u.t.terfly discards when it attains its final freedom, so private property may turn out to have already served its purpose if we can demonstrate ourselves so far developed as to be fit to cast it aside.

Let us recall what role private property plays in our human environment to-day:

It is the great stimulus which sets each one of us to work for himself, and by working for himself to acc.u.mulate wealth that contributes to the maintenance of all the rest. It furnishes (in theory) a method under which the man who works most effectually gets the highest reward.

Now, as it is essential in every community that every man should contribute to the maintenance of all, and as justice seems to demand that the workers should be rewarded according to results, it is claimed that private property solves the problem of production in a manner both effectual and just.

The compet.i.tive system, however, and the false notion of property to which the compet.i.tive system gives rise by setting every man to work for himself regardless of all the rest, prevents men from proceeding upon the far more economical plan of cooperation.